A Journey Though the Space Jam Website’s Hidden Layer of HTML Comments

Some parts of the galaxy can’t be seen with the naked eye. The same is true of the 1996 Space Jam website. Here, comments nested in the HTML create a layer of internet marginalia to frame our early web.

To think about this layer, we can start with the structure of the Space Jam website. In browsing the website, the homepage presents an orbital navigation with pages linked together like planets locked in a gravitational belt. For each of those pages, we can view source to peek at what lies beneath the user-facing front-end. This action can reveal HTML comments — like textual breadcrumbs left by the website’s creators twenty years later.

Space Jam, Jam Central (1996)

Space Jam, Stellar Souvenirs (1996)

Space Jam, Lunar Tunes (1996)

The HTML comments that create this layer of the Space Jam website vary in function, from guides to a digital space to declarative statements, distributed from its main navigation to the many subpages it houses.

While these examples are a fraction of the full catalog of HTML comments featured on the Space Jam website, they are a piece of the developer generated text that can surround works of the early internet — one comment at a time.